“Let me introduce my nephew,” said Mr. Morgan, as Cyril strolled up. “And this is my daughter. How now, Florence, have you found your boxes?”
“Allow me,” said Frithiof; “if you will tell me what to look for I will see that the hotel porter takes it all.”
There was a general adjournment to the region of pushing and confusion and luggage, and before long Frithiof had taken the travelers to his father’s carriage, and they were driving through the long, picturesque Strand-gaden. Very few vehicles passed through this main street, but throngs of pedestrians walked leisurely along or stood in groups talking and laughing, the women chiefly wearing full skirts of dark-blue serge, short jackets to match, and little round blue serge hoods surmounting their clean white caps; the men also in dark-blue with broad felt hats.
To English visitors there is an indescribable charm in the primitive simplicity, the easy informality of the place: and Frithiof was well content with the delighted exclamations of the new-comers.
“What charming ponies!” cried Blanche. “Look how oddly their manes are cut—short manes and long tails! How funny! we do just the opposite. And they all seem cream colored.”
“This side, Blanche, quick! A lot of peasants in sabots! and oh! just look at those lovely red gables!”
“How nice the people look, too, so different to people in an English street. What makes you all so happy over here?”
“Why, what should make us unhappy?” said Frithiof. “We love our country and our town, we are the freest people in the world, and life is a great pleasure in itself, don’t you think? But away in the mountains our people are much more grave. Life is too lonely there. Here in Bergen it is perfection.”
Cyril Morgan regarded the speaker with a pitying eye, and perhaps would have enlightened his absurd ignorance and discoursed of Pall Mall and Piccadilly, had not they just then arrived at Holdt’s Hotel. Frithiof merely waited to see that they approved of their rooms, gave them the necessary information as to bankers and lionizing, received Mr. Morgan’s assurance that the whole party would dine at Herr Falck’s the next day, and then, having previously dismissed the carriage, set out at a brisker pace than usual on his walk home.
Blanche Morgan’s surprise at the happy-looking people somehow amused him. Was it then an out-of-the-way thing for people to enjoy life? For his own part mere existence satisfied him. But then he was as yet quite unacquainted with trouble. The death of his mother when he was only eleven years old had been at the time a great grief, but it had in no way clouded his after-life, he had been scarcely old enough to realize the greatness of his loss. Its effect had been to make him cling more closely to those who were left to him—to his father, to his twin-sister Sigrid, and to the little baby Swanhild (Svarnheel), whose birth had cost so much. The home life was an extremely happy one to look back on, and now that his year of absence was over and his education finished it seemed to him that all was exactly as he would have it. Faintly in the distance he looked forward to further success and happiness; being a fervent patriot he hoped some day to be a king’s minister—the summit of a Norwegian’s ambition; and being human he had visions of an ideal wife and an ideal home of his own. But the political career could very well wait, and the wife too for the matter of that. And yet, as he walked rapidly along Kong Oscars Gade, through the Stadsport, and past the picturesque cemeteries which lie on either side of the road, he saw nothing at all but a vision of the beautiful dark gray eyes which had glanced up at him so often that afternoon, and in his mind there echoed the words of one of Bjornson’s poems: